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John’s Status Report for 4/12

This week I completed the assembly for the game controllers and modules. It involved gluing things together and a lot of soldering.

Module Assembly

There are 6 total modules that do different things in the game, but there are 3 different kinds of modules (2 buttons, 1 slide potentiometer, 3 encoders).

The bottom of each module is a row of 8 pogo pins that are magnetized and will stick to the pins in the module slots.

Inside of each module there are 1 or 2 pieces of perfboard, depending on the module type. For the encoder module, which is shown below, there is a piece of perfboard glued to the bottom which connects power/ground to the corresponding ID pins so the Arduino knows which of the 6 modules it is. The top perfboard holds the encoder in place and wires them to the lower perfboard. The second image shows different ID pin configurations for each of the 6 modules.

Controller Assembly

Each controller is a box with two module slots. For each module slot, a row of pogo pins (8 pins each) is soldered to a piece of perfboard. 8 Wires are then soldered to the perfboard and connect to the header pins of the arduino. The pogo pin perfboard is also glued to the 3D printed module slot which is glued to the controller.

I glued 5 of 6 panel box sides together. The 6th side, which has the hole for the USB cable to the Arduino, is left un-glued for now so it’s accessible.

The Arduino and wiring inside of controller box:

All of the assembled parts:

Progress and Next Week’s Deliverables

Progress is on track for the final demo/report/presentation. For next week, I will be preparing for the presentation and report since I am delivering the final presentation. I will also update the software if playtesting from users yields any valuable feedback.

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Angela’s Status Report 4/12

Lots of progress this week, mostly focused on visual improvements for the game. Comprehensive list of improvements and gameplay screenshots under the cut.

Next week I will be gathering playtesting feedback in order to identify areas of improvement for the game and to see how well our game meets the enjoyability metric that we set in our design report. In addition to whatever improvements are suggested while playtesting, I also have a few more gameplay touchups in mind that I will be working on next week (adding a stun mechanic, a main menu, tutorial, pause menu, and scene transitions, and a counter for number of fish killed as well as a high score tracker for maximum depth reached and max number of fish killed).

For tests on the enjoyability of the game (unrelated to controller tests, which Alan / John will work on), we’ll be handing out a playtesting survey when we have people try our game. To measure enjoyability we will be using a simple, binary “would you recommend this game” question in the survey, similar to how Steam user reviews work. Tests haven’t been performed yet because we are still working on finishing construction of both controllers. Continue reading “Angela’s Status Report 4/12”

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Team Status Report 4/12

The biggest risk to our project is probably we need to get the game play testable soon so that we can get feedback and iterate upon it. The next playtesting night is this Tuesday 6-8 so we want the game playable by then.

No changes have been made to the overall design.

Photos are in individual status reports. We’ve made some good additions to the game. We also have working prototypes of the controllers.

For the enjoyment of the game requirement, we have made a survey and plan on giving it to playtesters at the hunt playtesting night. We have already met the cost requirement and we have calculated the cost of parts in our design report. We will add timers to our code to detect the more quantitative timing requirements.

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Alan’s Status report 4/12

This week and last week I did a decent amount of iteration and printing of the modules. Again, I forgot to take pictures of the 3D prints, but I think yall saw them at the interim demo.

picture of new lid with snappable feature.

John got the electronics to work in time for demo. Past demo, we decided to make the module body shorter since we didn’t end up needing all that space and it would have a nicer feel for the player. I also had to fix the module holder design since there was not really any way to properly insert the pogo pins in the current design (I don’t have a picture of that either, but I guess you’ll see it at demo or our weekly meeting).

I also laser cut a second controller so now we should have all the parts for everything necessary for final demo.

controller

 

For verification of the module designs, a lot of the physical requirements are pretty straight forward to test. The dimensions of the controller are guaranteed because I CADded the wood faces to meet those specs. The weight we will test by weighing the total of the controller panels and the arduino. I’m not entirely sure where to get a scale, but I don’t think it should be too hard to find one.

We will get be able to test some of the durability and ease of module swapping requirements when we actually get to play testing.